Theme one:
The theme sci-fi can easily be described as futuristic. When someone says sci-fi I immediately think of star wars. Shiny ships with ion engines and lots and lots of dashboards with blinking light.
Sci-fi basically points to the idea of science and inventions that have not yet been developed.
Image 1: Eve online.
I think this image represents the theme sci-fi pretty accurately. The image depicts a space ship mid-flight. The ship is very high tech and although we have somewhat perfected space travel we are a long way from that type of technology.
Image 2: Halo 4
This image is of “Master Chief” , a cyberneticaly augmented human with heightened strength and perception. He is wearing a combat armor with built in support for advanced tactical AI’s. Although this technology has been discussed in military circles it has never been achieved and as with the spaceships from Eve Online, the technology is well outside our reach.
My Sci-fi crate.
For my first theme I choose sci-fi. My reference was mainly a Borderlands 2 “Hyperion chest”.
This chest follows the structure of the aforementioned model as it is wide and long. I imagined it as a chest with two side compartments that will open at the same time as the main compartment. The opening itself will be the two blocks of the main compartment sliding apart but I haven’t gotten around to modeling the inside and animating the opening sequence.
Theme two: Medieval
The theme medieval doesn’t have to have a detailed introduction. A medieval chest is basically a chest from the middle ages. When I chose that theme and decided to make a chest using medieval as a visual style I did a quick Google image search with the keywords “medieval” and “chest” and got a myriad of images of chest from that particular point in time.
Image 1: Chivalry
This image depicts a knight, possibly fighting in the holy crusade. One thing that defines “medieval” in this picture is the obvious religious symbols on the knights helmet.
My second chest was supposed to be a medieval chest. I was going for something a little nicer than the ordinary chest. A chest you might want to keep valuable items in. The design is what you would expect from a European-medieval chest, it has a rounded top and stands on 4 legs. Of course I tried not to make the base model to detailed since I think that is best done with texturing.
Theme 3:
Post apocalyptic as a theme can be explained as “after the apocalypse” when everything is destroyed, often by a war or something in the likes of that scenario. Some common sights when playing a post-apocalyptic game is destroyed cars riddled with rust, burnt down houses and debris everywhere.
Image 1: Fallout 3.
This game serves as an excellent example of post-apocalyptic. The setting is Washington DC and its surrounding areas. Everything is completely destroyed by an atomic war between the United States and the Chinese.
My third theme is post-apocalyptic. Quite frankly I chose this theme because I’ve played a lot of post-apocalyptic games.
My post apocalyptic crate:
For this crate I decided to go for your run of the mill wooden crate. The design is simple since yet again the details is in the textures. If I get around to applying a texture to it, I plan to make the wood look cracked with rusted nails in them, maybe give it a crooked build and basically make it look old and wrecked.
Summary:
I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise as it helped me define what I was creating. Part of me learning how to model in 3D has been to just cerate random shapes and every now and again a house. I’ve recently started working on an ”Iron Man” styled power armor for Batman but this was among the first times I’ve ever opened 3DS max actually knowing what I wanted to create. It’s hard to actually make an object look like it could fit into the visual styles of pots-apocalyptic or medieval without adding a considerable amount of detail and if you’re not going to texture your model, which is the case with two of them, it’s kind of hard to define the objects characteristics.
Alex Westerdahl 